


Pomes

by Mothfinder_General



Category: Original Work
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-25
Updated: 2014-05-25
Packaged: 2018-01-26 11:41:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 3,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1687019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mothfinder_General/pseuds/Mothfinder_General
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A selection of poems written while I was still writing poetry, a long time ago. For the Dr Frankenstein Anon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Translations from the Tlön XII

I know that my presence here

Deepens the dark in the corner.

In tears of oil, tressed tearings of hair

I leave hot perfumes, smudged in air

In the white kindness of your room.

 

Torn but with the folds gathered in,

Ragged and rolled in a smudge,

Dark in the corner, paused and forlorn,

I’m made chasm sadder by your light smile

In the cool whiteness of your room.

 

So bright your eyes and pleasant face

Are towards my smudging ghost.

Your long hands with haloes and hellos

Take care to not quite touch the darkness

In the bright coolness of your room.

 

Ripped ghost I am, and lovelorn,

Broken against your friendly light.

I am ashamed to darken your corner

But I would so like to malinger

In the doorway of your room.


	2. Desire

Lady Orb, that tempest-tugger,

Hooks her white shafts into the sea.

Thetis, blindly rolling undr,

Shrieks out a spastic drowning plea.

 

Virgo Diana’s showcased nude,

Pinned, dead and dusty, by the stars,

Atróphied limbs on sky bestrewed;

The Lady grins her grin of scars,

 

Claws Thetis, who, in reaction

Along the seabed soaks and creaks.

Devilled by lunar attraction

Through instinct flinches when she speaks.

 

Thetis almost regrets the day

(Weak Thetis with her seaweed coat

And rank-carbuncled-flesh cliché)

The Leopard ate Diana’s throat.

 

Languid Leopard, Dante’s Luster,

She, I’ve said, murdered Diana.

Lady, freed from thighs that trussed her

Sings out garbled black Hosannahs.

 

Meek, manic, mould’ring Thetis knows

She’ll play out Lady’s coital whim,

For tides come where the moonlight goes –

The Leopard takes a midnight swim.


	3. Humanity vs Reality

Do not go back to back with desert sand,

For then your helpless eyes must take it in –

The awfulness of the unending sky,

The damned eternity that wrinkles by.

 

Your back grows cold as emptiness unfolds.

Even violence and love start to recede.

It makes you feel naked with its stare.

It makes you feel like you’re not really there.

 

You beat your lids together but it stays

And presses down upon you like an oath –

That nothing that no one has touched or trod,

Nothing to save or straint you from a God.

 

We try to hang our numbers in the sky;

The things that you call stars are actually

The sand you have thrown up to hurt that place,

The tears that now are slipping down your face.


	4. The Bad Heart

These nighttime palpitations start to hurt.

Most delicate machine that is the heart

Has only so much binding it can take

Before it tries to break against the wall.

From such an injury I will never wake,

Not that I wish to wake again at all.

 

Why does this organ commandeer my all?

(I find myself considering my heart,

Leaning a throbbing temple on the wall.)

Though acting as it does causes such hurt,

It brings my blood to bear me when I wake,

Shows liquid life in veins the way to take.

 

I know, of course, what action I should take:

I tell myself the emptiness won’t hurt;

I tell myself it would be nice to wake

Without a berry-red and hungry heart.

This pulsing fruit that thinks it knows it all

Should be dug out and crushed against the wall!

 

But what if I should push it through the wall?

What if, on your white hands, there dropped my heart?

You would be quite the master of my hurt!

I know the heartless action you would take –

You would drag the hopeless thing in your wake,

Deride, and drop it, and despise it all.

 

No! That is not your calm way, not at all! –

Your white hands would not recognise the hurt.

Though you’ve dipped in the punnet, you’d not take

Your place in the hot hollow of my heart.

Firmly on the other side of the wall,

You are the Lazarus I cannot wake.

 

I cannot get to sleep, but dare not wake!

I long to touch your throat, but can not take

The dream-like steps to let me through the wall.

I wish your pale blue eyes could know it all.

The half-knowledge of one night is a hurt.

If only you could know you bit my heart!

 

My dear, my friend, the worst of the bad heart,

Why do you feel the need to have this wall?

That is the thing that hurts me most of all.


	5. Wishing Well

I am the girl who jumped down the well.

I was looking for my echo, like you are,

In the faltering coin of the water,

And I saw my one true love sitting down here.

I fell like a penny into his arms.

 

He told me that he would be mine forever,

That earth and streets and carpets were for others,

That the circle of sky above was our wedding ring,

That in this well I would never be lonely.

He was my love, and I believed him.

 

For a time, we were cosily happy

To gaze at the sky and gaze at each other.

We laughed at those who still walked about,

Pitied their hopeless pacing in the gardens –

We had our well and didn’t want a ladder.

 

But, after a time, moss grew from the walls.

My love was entranced. “How lovely

We should have blossomings down here!

It reminds me of the red roses upstairs.”

He said he would like to give me a rose.

 

I replied that I had no interest in flowers –

After all I had jumped down a well –

But his interest had been engaged

And he began to talk as if enamoured.

I had noticed lately I was much submerged.

 

One night when we looked up at our circle

He saw constellations like tulips.

“Of course, I can hardly teach you about them _here_.”

Meanwhile the water crept up to our chests.

Did I mention that I can’t swim?

 

Most days now he talks of horticulture.

He barely looks at me or the light,

But stares at the moss with his mind on roses.

I wish I had thought to bring a ladder.

I’m trapped in this well and the water is rising.


	6. The White Stag

Between the trees the white stag runs.

The hunter pursues it on horseback or on foot.

That flash of white is a fever beating among the branches

And in the tangled paths of his dreams.

He has never seen more than a glimpse of it

And the woods grow deeper and thicker everyday.

When he closes his eyes, he can hear the trees getting taller.

If he breathes in too quickly, the woods reach for him.

Still he pushes on with the chase

As turning back means reconstructing his path

And he knows in his heart he is hopelessly lost.

 

The poet is sitting by a lake in the wood.

There is no grass, but pebbles, and the rain falls often.

She is trying to write a poem about the hunter,

Failing dismally and getting soaked in the meantime.

The lake only provides her reflections and deflections

And she is afraid of the growth of the wood.

If only, she thinks, I understood what he was chasing

And why it stops him skimming stones with me.

I hope he is simply flung along by the chase.

She glances back at her poem; it is weakly constructed

(Like the two of them) on the pun of ‘hart’ and ‘heart’.


	7. Sufludes

I.

 

It does my soul some good to hear

The names of Soviet literati.

Pasternak, especially, lies like a cat

Across a mind found rucked and rumpled.

When the rhymes seem forced or farce

I think about a face, translating.

 

My copy of Zamyatin’s _We_

(A triumphantly battered paperback)

I treat as a passport to old sunlight –

Old sunlight and young dust on folders

In a shoebox room in a flaking house

Where a paper-pale young man in jeans

Writes ‘Zamyatin’s _We_ ’ on a post-it and smiles.

 

II.

 

Mayakovsky sounds as if

His name should be leant to a moth,

And Mandelstam is something that

Requires at least 200 volts.

 

By contrast, Auden pleasantly

Evokes the shadow cast by stone.

And Pound, although he was quite mad,

Is ponderous with calm intent.

 

From my place across the decades

Looking at these towering men,

And after them, the spires and castles

That stretch across the ledge of hills

 

That lead down into low strange valleys

Where we write our verse today –

I feel like something from the bushes

Imitating upright carriage.

 

Even the images in this section

Are a mess of half-formed shapes.

I really ought to stick to reading,

Admiring, envying and daydreaming.

 

I will try, though, to partially blame

The English disregard of poets.

You once said, “We need a revolution.”

I agreed and we both sighed;

 

Middle class kids with nowhere to hide.

 

III. 

 

I once made you read Eliot.

Words fail.

If I could express what he did to me

I’d just sound like I lost control.

I probably did.

 

I’d hoped you’d go away

To read.

If I could express what I wanted it to do

I’d be a better poet. I wouldn’t have

To write this.

 

I hope now that you see his name

And recall

Breathless enthusiasm, and re-read

‘Preludes’, and see my grin in the half-rhymes.

I still wonder.


	8. How To Pray

Put your palm together with closed eyes.

Kneel down or hunch the shoulders round the throat.

Begin the recitation of the words.

 

If you do not know the ready formula

Please remain in a position of suppliance.

Await instructions or inspiration.

 

Resist the urge to see who else is waiting

Half-expectant, half resigned to silence.

Assume the sense of failure part of prayer.

 

Focus on pictures in your thoughts that dissipate

Like nosebleeds in a font of holy water

As soon as you lean down to stir and see them.

 

Plaster the mind over with grey eminence.

Do not daydream, in case it is noticed.

Do not beseech, in case it is noticed.

 

Rise and pass the palms over the eyelids.

Gather your trailing thoughts and exit blinking.

Do not question the purpose of this exercise.


	9. Snake and Cake

Snake and Cake walk arm in arm

Unnerving like a surgeon.

They are the ‘other’ version

Of the 3am fables

About unspecific harm.

 

Arm in arm walk Snake and Cake,

Stamping on the pavement’s face.

Their wet breath forms a squalid lace.

They are the gentry in this world

When the people will not wake.

 

Snake and Cake arm in arm walk.

Gunshots of their footsteps sound

And a brave man can’t be found

To silence these two monsters

(Even though they do not talk).


	10. Suiciding Matches

The mayfly, a wisp of day-long life

Is content, I suppose, because it never yearns.

Being as light as the wind that carries it,

It must dance hard not to fall apart.

It keeps its fleck-of-dirt heart together.

 

Trees too, growing like the teeth of the earth

Probably feel pretty cheerful. Eternal things

(The weather, the starlight) are on nodding terms

And things of less permanence tickle occasionally.

Everything is everything. They put out their leaves.

 

Matches, though, alive through their act of creation

Are more miserable than any truly alive thing.

Light one, and it flares, looking for a soul.

Once denied, it settled down to the business

Of destroying the stick and so its existence.


	11. The Gold of the Leaves

Under the spreading street-tree green

The gold of the leaves was a melancholy thing.

Like that street and that crooked house,

That watercolour summer, that watercolour noise,

It was somehow about your absence and presence.

 

Now the year-end rubs the whole city grey

With the coal dust from that burnt-out affair.

New time collects in the Union pints

Or in figures walking up and down the floor

As if the golds of the leaves never were.

 

The last time I saw you, the dark was descending

Already, through the wind tunnel near Euston Square.

The fine light faded at Warren Street Station.

My unaccustomed kiss on your cheek caused a smile

Like the last that I saw of the gold sun on leaves.

 

Then the rains came.

 

_Under the spreading street-tree green_

_You’ll be silent, I’ll be mean._

_For three months you’ve not been seen_

_Under the spreading street-tree green._

_Still, when weak, that gold I see._

_I’ll dream you if you dream me._

_I can never quite break free,_

_Under the street-green spreading tree._


	12. La Vase Tristesse

_‘Je t’adore à_ _l’égal de la voûte nocturne,_

_Ô vase de tristesse, ô grande taciturne,_

_Et t’aime d’autant plus, belle, que to me fuis…’_

_\- Baudelaire_

I.

 

I am in love with a man I knew for half an hour.

He is your brother.

His pale blue eyes glittered distantly in

Pale blue contempt and interest,

Closing with ribbon lids.

 

II.

 

I have avoided our old place

For fear you will not be sentinel there,

Staring into windows, as I plan to.

 

I see strangers in the streets with hint of you

Dawning and fading over their faces –

But of course I think I’ve seen your brother.

 

My casual weekday daydreams

Are speckled with such familiar strangers.

It’s foolish because I know exactly what you look like.

 

III. 

 

When I start falling asleep each night

I sense gravity and darkness around my forehead,

Filled with pale blue stars.

I’ve put my head into a vase of sky,

Tolerably beautiful, oddly silent. I’m sure

 

Your brother’s in here somewhere,

Breathing out the mist that makes me so miserable.

Or is it you?

 

Now I can feel the stars looking through me

And the vase of sky is starting to grow cold.

Where are you? You’re in here.

You’re brothers in here somewhere.


	13. (Untitled)

There is no place outside this room

Where time and thought are folded up.

The daylight dawns and then withdraws,

Having pressed briefly on the curtains.

Breath and sighs drift up the curtains

To fall back on lips and the floor.

 

Light is the restful crescent moon

Of cheekbones on a thought-touched face.

Time is the road perhaps outside

If ‘outside this room’ is such a place.

There is rustling, talking, moving,

Then sleep comes, and with it dreaming.

 

Sighs and kisses have all settled

In shallow hollows by the throat.

Thought and time will unspool soon,

But for now these breaths are peaceful:

There is no place outside this room.


	14. ‘It’s Your Decision’

I am not so sure of things anymore.

It seems as if they have receded from me

Or have put on layers and layers and asked me to call again later.

 

The uncertainty of traffic lights is hard to watch,

Recalling as it does the tightness of a strap or belt.

So I wait on pavement edges, allowing the climb

Of my pulse from my heart to the nerve knot of my brain.

 

Drizzle and rivalry have become my fault

And my fault is the great bent spider

Creeping terrible out of the fruit bowl

Into ears or into old dreams.

 

Things, I think, are watching me judgementally

Until the time comes that, for want of surety of the floor,

I fall to my knees and start screaming mindlessly.

For now I am reciting, with increasing desperation,

The alphabet, over and over and over.


	15. (Untitled 2)

What there is of me I wear outwardly

– wear myself inside out, and wear you out –

this monstrous labour of flesh and thought.

Grim gloom, mellow sadness, laughter

stitched together like a ragdoll’s coat.

 

(The slave carrying a burden on bare shoulders

slick with sweat, and hunched over.

His naked back is open to the whip,

Naked and shining like a fruit unsplit.)

 

So I have tugged my ragdoll’s coat around me.

pulling tight until the seams show white,

and all that I am in my threadbare essence

lies taut across me for the whip and the knife.

 

Ought I leave the coat undone and open

to stand nude and shameless before you?

You’ve no interest in the planes of my body;

you’d spit out the pips of a Clementine

for the cumbersome juicy flesh.

 

I put on this coat to hide a nude dignity,

naked and stupid in a clothed coherency.


	16. In the Forest

The sickle crescent of your cheekbone

Is an unfair, unmanning thing.

Though often through the leafmould on the path

I’ve walked, the frost here always stings.

 

Some time ago, fled in this forest

A white stag, pursued by a man.

He lost his bearings after three days,

The rain fell often; still he ran.

 

The flowers bled, the trees were silent,

Fungi sent forth the scent of skin.

He had forgotten what it looked like;

His calm pale face was growing thin.

 

In a small clearing, by a small pool,

Under the slow rain, skipping stones,

I waited for him three days longer,

Dressed in a robe the colour of bones.

 

But on the fourth, the rain stopped falling.

I put my coat on, and a scarf.

The frost was sharp and cruelly rising –

I walked home by this mourning path.

 

(For days I had a terrible cold.)

I doubt he ever caught that stag.

It is a dreambent twilight creature,

Seeming the closest when you lag,

 

But if you feel it by your reaches

It will have been a trick of light.

The rain is frequent and deceptive,

Greying day and silvering night.

 

Oh yes, I know this forest well now.

I feel the tree roots rend my heart.

And you, you once picked berries for me,

Now walk at least a foot apart.

 

Doubtless you’ll shortly coolly tell me

The stag’s a symbol, or some such,

And turn your crescent cheekbone from me –

Oh God, oh God, it hurts so much.

 

We should turn back, the frost is coming,

As swift and violent as a crime.

You say you cannot feel the frost at

All? I feel it all the time.


	17. Moth Dust

 I.

 

In a café my friend told me,

“You can’t stroke moths because you stroke off all their moth dust

and they can’t fly. I think they die.”

 

I’ve sent those creatures,

mad by candles, stuttering in paroxysms

on hot wet nights. I hate them on sight.

 

The mindless flutter,

grief-stricken epileptic sensuality

of their wings. Sweat crawls on my skin.

 

When the hours give out between the sheets

I can see their frantic shadows walk the walls

and gather in heaps. I can’t sleep.

 

II.

 

Today, I will abstain.

Allow me disloyalty, I’ll allow you the same.

I will abstain from tooth and claw,

or whispering, “We’re so much more.”

I need no more.

I will obey, I reek of change.

Do not let me seek a door

or suffer my excuses at the hold.

I need no more.

I will suspend me in abeyance,

depend on you, exude reliance

whilst nurturing the end defiance,

passive-aggressive – but til then, compliant.

I’m here; I want to be your tyrant.

Whip to check we bleed

and bite. Abstain and watch the insects.

 

III.

 

If my wardrobe were infested with moths

I’d lock them in and leave them there.

Maybe leave the flat for a day or two.

 

Walking very carefully,

I’d mention the seething behind doors

quite casually to friends.

 

Then when I came home, I’d unlock,

face dust and madness on their wings,

open my mouth, let them flop out and smother me.


End file.
